hg clone help & links

[Steve Borho]

On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 22:50 +0200, Guido Ostkamp wrote:
> (sorry, used the wrong email address, I just try again):
> 
> Hello,
> 
> On Tue, 23 Oct 2007, Johannes Stezenbach wrote:
> > I use cp -al regularly with my local repos and never had a problem with 
> > it. In the worst case you could lose uncomitted working files, but not 
> > comitted stuff in .hg/ since hg knows how to handle hardlinks correctly.
> 
> the main problems with Mercurial's hardlink concept, whether with the 
> standard 'clone' or the 'cp -al' method are
> 
> - that it only works on the same filesystem because hardlinks are only 
> possible within the same filesystem
> 
> - you can't move away your base repository from this filesystems without 
> doubling the space needed for storage considering the clones
> 
> - it still uses a lot of valuable resources in the filesystem. Even 
> i-nodes are limited and the object-names use up space.
> 
> I believe that 'git' offers the better alternatives here. With the 'git 
> clone --shared' command you can setup a clone of an repository that has a 
> single '.git/objects/info/alternates' file so that the new repository 
> starts without any objects of its own. It doesn't even need to be in the 
> same filesystem. And AFAIK if you move away your base repository you just 
> need to adapt the contents of this alternates file.
> 
> It would be great to have a similar feature in Mercurial.

I believe the overlay extension is intended to offer just this sort of
feature.

-- 
Steve Borho (steve at borho.org)
http://www.borho.org/~steve/steve.asc
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